Thickening Skin

I want to thank those who contacted me on this blog with their comments and those who e-mailed me. I appreciate your encouragement. With a little prayer, quite a bit of consideration, and a e-mail that helped me with some perspective, I will continue blogging. It is interesting to me how someone who has never met me but took the time to write me had such good insight. I think it helped that she is also a blogger who had this exact dilemma. Her advice boiled down to this…..

“Resistant Hermit is YOUR blog. Your goal was to be authentic and document who you are, right?” umm right. (My original goal to blogging was that if something happened to me, my children would know exactly who I am, how I felt, and how I saw the world). She asked “what are you afraid of?” I think I have made it plain that I hate conflict, literally my stomach turns. I usually avoid conflict. The only time I don’t run from it is when I see or hear something I consider very unjust. Usually something to do with Racism, Special Needs, women’s and minority rights, etc. I then become a tiger. But at least on this blog, I avoid serious subjects that might bring on conflict. Why do I do that? I hate conflict that I think I can avoid. That is what it boils down to. But her next question she asked and then her perspective really hit home. She asked “What’s the worse that can happen?” And basically this was her advice. Keep my comment settings like I have them at the moment. So that I read them before publishing. Publish any that is civil, even if differing, but while reading them, the moment someone turns ugly, read no further and delete. This is what she does. She also said to grow a spine. Well she did not say those words, but she did say something like not having a thin skin. She is right. Right on all of it.

So I will start writing with my original purpose of the blog in mind. To show my authentic self. Warts and all. Day to day happens still, but with a large dose of my perspective on life in general. And I am sure making tons of mistakes a long the way. Allowing myself to be vulnerable. Opening myself up to criticism and learning from it. But never allow someone to cross the line of meanness. Over the last few years when I have posted about certain subjects, for example when I talked about pain control, I was called an addict and druggy from people crawling out of the woodwork. Ended up removing that post. When I have talked about being a Christian/Democrat, I was told I was not a Christian and was a baby killer. It amazes me sometimes that I can write about a dozen posts in a row that will get no comment from anyone. But the moment I post something of substance, I will get negative mean comments from people who say they read my blog all the time. Well if you read it all the time, why wait to post the negative. Would posting something encouraging kill you? I do have a few that every so often comment encouraging, positive things. I don’t need tons of readers or tons of comments, I just think it is sad that some will only wait to comment when they can try to tear me down. That is not cool.

So with that said. I will thicken my skin while moderating the comments before publishing them. Thank you J. for your thoughtful e-mail and for the other e-mails and those who wrote me here.